04/18/2017

"The Body Keeps Score"by Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D. is the most comprehensive book I have read about the affects of childhood trauma on our lives. And, how the medical community is in the learning stages of how to effectively deal with adult children of abuse.

I am listening to this book, but ordered the hard copy to use as a reference.

Here is about the brain and trauma... This is long but so insightful as to what happens in the brain.

"SHIFTING TO ONE SIDE OF THE BRAIN"

The scans also revealed that during flashbacks, our subjects' brains lit up only on the right side. Today there's a huge body of scientific and popular literature about the difference between the right and left brain. Back in the early nineties I had heard that some people had begun to divide the world between left-brainers (rational, logical people) and right-brainers (the intuitive, artistic ones), but I hadn't paid much attention to this idea. However, our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left."

"We now know that the two halves of the brain do speak different languages. The right is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial, and tactual, and the left is linguistic, sequential and analytical. While the left half o the brain does all the talking, the right half of the brain carries the music of the experience. It communicates through facial expressions and body language and by making sounds of love and sorrow: by singing, swearing, crying, dancing, or mimicking. The right brain is the first to develop in the womb, and it carries nonverbal communication between mother and infants. We know the left hemisphere has come online when children start to understand language and learn how to speak. this enables them to name things, compare them, understand their interrelations, and begin to communicate their own unique, subjective experiences to others."

"The left and right sids of the brain also process the imprints of the past in dramatically different ways. The left brain remembers facts, statistics, and vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions they evoke. It reacts automatically to voices, facial features, and gestures and places experienced in the past. What it recalls feels like intuitive truth - the way things are. Even as we enumerate a loved ones virtues to a friend, our feelings may be more deeply stirred by how her face recalls the aunt we loved at age four."

"Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling."

Deactivation of the left hemisphere has a direct impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate our shifting feelings and perceptions into words. Without sequencing we can't identify cause and effect, grasp the long-rem effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future. People who are very upset sometimes say they are "losing their minds." In technical terms they are experiencing the loss of the executive functioning."

"When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past - they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you "never listens to me." Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and over time our research demonstrated why."

"STUCK IN FLIGHT OR FIGHT"

"What happened to Marsha in the scanner gradually started to make sense. Thirteen years after her tragedy we had activated the sensations - the sounds and images from the accident - that were still stored in her memory. When these sensations came to the surface, they activated her alarm system, which caused her to react as if she were back in the hospital being told that her daughter had died. The passage of thirteen years was erased. Her sharply increased heart rate and blood pressure reading reflected her physiological state of frantic alarm."

"Adrenaline is one of the hormones that are critical to help us fight back or flee in the face of danger. Increased adrenaline was responsible for our participants' dramatic rise in heart rate and blood pressure while listening to their trauma narrative. Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, takes much longer to return to baseline, and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term healthy issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual."

"We now know that there is another possible response to threat, which our scans are't capable of measuring. Some people simply go into denial. Their bodies register threat, but their conscious minds go on as if nothing has happened. However, even though the mind may learn to ignore the messages from the emotional brain, the alarm system signals don't stop. The emotional brain keeps working, and stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize and collapse. The physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice when they are expressed as illness. Medications, drugs, and alcohol can also temporarily dull or obliterate unbearable sensations and feelings. But the body continues to keep score...."

He goes on to say further on:

"For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of taking about distressful feelings can resolve them. However, as we've seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of doing that. No matter how much insight and understand we develop, the rational brain is impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. I am continually impressed by how difficult it is for people who have gone through the unspeakable to convey the essence of their experience. It is so much easier to talk about what has been done to them, to tell a story of victimization and revenge - than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience."

"Our scans reveal how their dread persisted and could be triggered by multiple aspects of daily experience. They had not integrated their experience into the ongoing stream of their life. They continued to be "there" and did not know how to be "here" - fully alive in the present." Bessel

What we call mental illness, often is the affects of living through a traumatic childhood. Our brains are literally affected - while our bodies truly keep score.

I highly suggest listening to this book, if you want to understand your own traumatization or that of someone you love. This book makes complete sense to me and how inept our medical system is to help us navigate through our affects of early childhood trauma!

Often the diagnosis isn't childhood trauma, but the effects of it.

How our body responds and not the cause of it. We often treat the symptoms but not the cause. And, how do we treat childhood trauma, compared to how we treat depression???

I love this book on so many levels!

Incredible information - The Body Keeps Score! What an amazing human body we live in!

the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.

This is why I sometimes struggle with 'kindness'.

We are asked to ignore the behavior and "be kind", regardless whether we agree with it or not.

It has always seemed like a victim stance to me.

A powerless place to be in.

Being kind can often mean excessive tolerance with bad behavior.

How can we maintain our own integrity and not tolerate something we do not agree with AND, still be kind?

What is kind to poor behavior?

Or, what is healthy and respectful to you?

And even respectful to the one who is doing something wrong?

Is it kind to ignore bad behavior?

Is our kindness dependent upon our tolerance?

If this is so, I am not very kind.

I have a very low tolerance for agreeing with something I disagree with.

A few days ago, I had someone comment on one of my blog posts...and wanted to chat via email; but remain anonymous. My disagreement to chatting with a faceless, nameless person was seen as me having "negative assumptions".

Really?

They wanted to place responsibility of our 'lack of communication' on me.

I am the problem, cause I didn't agree with them being faceless; I am unkind.

In my world, I get to decide who and how I communicate.

I may be seen as unkind, but it isn't kind to me to agree when I disagree.

04/15/2017

Martha Beck wrote about honesty check-ins. Where you set a timer and when the buzzer rings throughout your day, you see if what you are doing is in agreement with your truth.

"At your first few honesty check-ins, you may notice nothing at all. Or you may feel only a twitch of nerves, a wisp of sadness. Ask yourself, What could this sensation be trying to tell me? If no answer arises, that's okay. Just write "I don't know," set the timer again, and repeat. Your truth is like a wild animal; if it's been attacked or suppressed, it may take some time to show itself. Be gentle. With time and repetition, you'll eventually connect."

"When a new truth comes up, it may be a simple yes or no, or a flood of realizations: Maybe you don't want to say no to your mother for fear of losing her love. Or you hate business trips (that's why you always get migraines on planes!) Or you're dying to be outdoors, not cooped up inside. Write down everything without judgement. If your smack-dab in pure authenticity, write about the joy. If you've been lying until your pants burst into flames, write about the misery and anger."

"An honesty day is a hero's saga. With each check-in, you'll come closer to your real moment-to-moment truth. As the Good Book says, that alone is enough to set you free. Over time, when you become more aware of the ways you deceive yourself, you may begin making subtle (or not so subtle) behavior shifts. You may choose authenticity more often. Obligations may become unbearable. Unwanted relationships will wither; better ones will blossom."

"This is addictive stuff. My own honesty day led to another, then a week, a year, and then an indefinite commitment. Take it from me: You're about to change your life. The more honest you are, the more you'll find yourself doing what you love, with people you love, in places you love. You'll realize that nothing really true is unloving, and nothing unloving is ever really true. That wild creature, your true self, will come to meet you, then guide you home, one day at a time. Honestly." Martha

What I LOVE about this concept is this one line. "That nothing really true is unloving!"

And, she is so right. The more truthful I became in my life, the more there was to love about it.

If you are not loving your life, there is a real good chance you are not being your honest self as you respond to life.

I will try and make checks today, to see what I am doing and how I feel about it.

I don't like how I feel when I am doing something I don't want to do. There truly is a huge difference between what I love and what I don't love.

04/06/2017

While listening to a podcast, "Finding Mastery: Conversations with Michael Gervais" as he spoke to Chade-Meng Tan on Joy... they spoke about thin slices we can experience during the day.

His one example, was when your throat is dry and you take a sip of water, feel that!

I do this on my first few sips of Tea!

Joy

We often think it has to be big grand and expensive; that we have to travel far and strange and do adventurous things. But, you literally can feel joy, crawling into bed after a full day and laying your head on your pillow.

Or, the taste of chocolate, the sound of birds singing, the color as you paint a gourd!

Watching for tiny slices of joy will increase joy in your world.

One other thing that caught my attention was when they were speaking of peace.

How, when we are craving or desiring something, it steals our peace, because we can't be at peace until we have it. Whatever IT is.

Mine are simple cravings. Sweets. I am fine if they are at hand, but not so fine when they are not. Mostly, it would be thinking of what you 'should' have; but don't.

It is the absence of wanting, where peace is found.

Another thing that I am learning is how self care means taking time out for your self.

What I am finding, is that the more there is to do, the more 'needs' there are, the less I take care of me. Which is the opposite of what needs to happen. In the midst of busyness, is where I need my space the most.

A recharge.

A retreat.

Ask for a timeout!

As a busy mom, I rarely stepped out of being a mom and did something just for me.

Now, as a busy working, mom, grandma, I am finding it still applies.

Solo time, is key for me to stay in balance.

Sometimes we need to make waves in order to maintain balance and love, peace and joy in our worlds.

Joy is knowing it is up to me to design my life.

Today I will seek joy in simple things and see how many slices I find!